Hard policy questions about student blogging

A question for you: Should all student blogging be moderated?

I am really conflicted about this. I believe strongly in the benefits of student blogging. I think that if blogging is done in a closed (non-public) environment, it isn't really blogging and doesn't have the benefits of writing for an authentic audience.

In general, I think that teaching students to be responsible is a far better approach than trying to block or filter everything that might be dangerous. We should more time talking about 21st century skills and how to act prudently in the world that is out there.

On the other hand, I understand concerns about student online safety. There are many more subtle issues than just a concern that students might write something inappropriate.

Also when making a district-level decision about blogging policy, the feelings of the administration, board, and community need to be considered. Or do they? Is this a cop-out? This has been keeping me up nights.

I hope the edublogging community will write about these issues and post links to their thoughts. here. These are not easy issues, and I am looking for some thoughtful discussion on them.

Online graphic organizers

I recently evaluated some of the online graphic organizers available. The results are here. Different projects and student groups have different needs, so you'll want to evaluate them for your own purposes.

Please post a comment here or on the wiki if there are other online graphic organizers you've tried and liked.

End of Palm education purchase program

Palm has announced that their Education Purchase program will end Oct. 31.

If you have recently purchased a volume of Palm handhelds, make sure to get your claim form in asap.

Student blogging - working through the sticky issues

I spend a lot of time talking to people about the benefits of blogging. Students writing for a real audience and purpose leads to better writing, more motivation, critical thinking, collaboration, yada yada.

However, there are some admittedly sticky issues around student blogging. This week I had a chance to work through some of these in collaboration with a progressive district that is encouraging teachers and students to use blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies to develop literacy and critical thinking skills. Some of the issues we're talking about are:

• How do you set up student accounts without having student email accounts?
• If you want students to go beyond commenting on teacher posts to creating their own posts or even hosting their own blogs, how can that be monitored?

Many of the common blogging tools don't really address these issues. I'm a big fan of WordPress, so I started there. WordPress.com (they host) requires a valid and unique email address to get an account. WordPress.org (you host) will accept a bogus email account, but it's a hassle to have a large number of blogs on it. On either of these, if a student is administering their own blog, there is no automated way to see their work.

Some other popular blogging services (e.g. Blogger) are blocked in many schools, making their use less than optimal. Other blogging services that strive to be safe for students (e.g. Class Blogmeister) limit administration and primary authorship to teachers. Others charge a fee. Some school blogging platforms that are free aren't open source, meaning that they may or may not be free or even available next week. Other free services are less than reliable in terms of being up 24/7.

In the course of all this, we looked at WordPress MU, the multi-user version of WordPress. This works like Wordpress.com in that any registered user can create a new blog easily on the fly. (This works by setting up a domain with a wildcard, for example, *.blog.someschool.edu. Then if a student creates a blog, it becomes jsmith.blog.someschool.edu.) And the administrator can easily monitor and manage all blogs under the domain. The only drawback is that you have to host it yourself, but it really isn't very difficult. You just need a box with Apache, MySQL and PHP.

The interface is very slick. It has all the things I love about WordPress plus a whole suite of useful admin tools.


I'll post some updates as we get into using this more.

(Sidenote on student email: A pretty usable workaround on this is the Gmail trick. If your teacher gmail account is ksmithteacher@gmail.com and a student uses the email address ksmithteacher+kjonesstudent@gmail.com, all email to that address will go to you at ksmithteacher@gmail.com. That allows you to register students for services that require a unique and valid email without maintaining or needing to monitor an email account for them.)

Dell's new low-cost laptop

The long-rumored, low-cost laptop from Dell is now official: the Inspiron Mini 9 (currently available for pre-order only).

The prices start at $349 (not quite as low as had been rumored and hoped for, but prices generally fall over time) and go up to $449. Like other low-cost laptops, the lower end model ships with Linux (Ubuntu) and higher-priced models are available with XP. These models all ship with hard drives (4-16 GB) and wireless. Ports include USB (3), VGA out, Ethernet, headphone, mic, and a 3-in-1 media card reader. A web cam is optional.

Stay tuned for more info as these begin shipping. We'll also be posting a comparison grid of the many new low-cost laptops soon.

A passion for content

Some of you may have noticed that through this summer, I've been writing a little less on this blog. The reason is that over the past year, I have gotten very involved in the area of Open Education (similar to open source software, but focused on content) and thinking and writing a lot about that.

This interest has grown out of my work in developing content for mobile devices. I have come to the conclusion that mainstream textbook publishers are not likely to come out with meaningful content for mobile devices, and so we are forging on without them. :) After developing a large library of content on a contract basis for schools, we are now looking at open-licensed work as a more far-reaching strategy.

If you are interested in Open Ed and my thoughts on it, you might also want to read my Open Ed blog and check out our new open dictionary project.

In the meantime, I'll still be here on Mobile Musings as well. :)

TeacherTube Mashup

(cross-posted form Karen's Mashups)

Below is one of my favorite mashups of all time -- a compilation of different clips from TeacherTube. If you aren't familiar with TeacherTube, it's a video sharing service for educators that has all kinds of great content for a variety of subjects and grades and even professional development topics, produced by teachers, students, and professional organizations. I think this is a terrific resource for differentiating instruction (especially with mobile devices).




Full credits and links for this show here.

Please feel free to use this in any way you find useful. I plan to use it at professional development workshops to give folks a quick look at all the great free video resources available to them.